


these games we play (or, a study in trust)

by doctorkaitlyn



Series: Rounds of Kink [9]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bisexual Female Character, Breathplay, Choking, Community: rounds_of_kink, Established Relationship, Explicit Consent, F/M, Face-Sitting, Knifeplay, Light BDSM, POV Second Person, Restraints, Safe Sane and Consensual, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-24 10:38:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12010989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorkaitlyn/pseuds/doctorkaitlyn
Summary: There is a game you play when you need reassurance, when all of your past memories of misplaced trust are filling your brain like people trapped inside a stalled elevator, pounding on the metal walls with their fists, screaming and hyperventilating, distracting you from any other line of thought that isn’t directly related to them.The game is calleddo you trust me?The game goes like this.





	these games we play (or, a study in trust)

**Author's Note:**

> while I've tagged this as "Safe, Sane and Consensual", because that's how the characters view it, there's no actual discussion of safewords, which are _incredibly_ important, particularly when dealing with these types of kinks. 
> 
> seriously. I can't emphasize that enough. if knifeplay/breathplay is something that tickles your fancy, please make sure that you're doing it safely with someone you trust. 
> 
> written for Round 31 of Rounds of Kink, where the prompt was _on a whim_ and the kink was _knives and knife play._

You trust him. 

You trust that you can come home unexpectedly, two hours early on one of his days off, and you won’t find him in bed with someone else. You trust that if you ask him to do something, if you leave a note in the morning requesting that he take out the garbage or dump out the crumbs layering the inside of the toaster (because all you wanted was a bagel, and instead you got a cloud of noxious smoke), he’ll do it without being reminded. You trust that if you ask him to remind _you_ about something-

( _remind me later about that movie I want to go see_ or _remind me to call my brother_ or _remind me to reset my alarm_ )

-he’ll actually remember to do it. 

You trust that you can bring him along when you go home to visit your family and there won’t be any drama, not like your last partner, who’d gotten drunk the first time you brought her home and puked all over the kitchen table moments after your father finished setting it, or the one before that, who’d ended up getting in a screaming match with your stepmother about politics. 

No, that kind of thing doesn’t happen with him. Rather, each time you bring him home, you can trust that he’ll fully integrate yourself into your family’s lives. You can trust that he’ll effortlessly talk sports with your brother, football and baseball and basketball, despite the fact you’ve never actually seen him watch any of the above. You can trust that he’ll take up your father’s offer of a beer and won’t comment on the fact that he’s already wasted at five o’clock in the afternoon. You can trust that no matter how much your stepmother baits him, tries to get him to talk about politics or feminism or unions or _something_ that she could fight with him over, he’ll never fall for it. 

(And, trust or not, you resent him for that a little bit, don’t you? You resent how easily he segued into your life, how quickly he won over their approval, how he almost seems to _enjoy_ your requisite visits home even when you hate them, hate going back to a place where you don’t know how to talk, don’t know how to find common ground, where you have to carefully sever parts of yourself off and hide them away neatly just so that you don’t cause any turmoil. 

You resent that it feels more like his home than yours, like he’s the one who grew up within its nicotine stained walls and you’re the outsider trying desperately to be welcomed in.) 

You trust that, when it comes to the small things, he’s unfailingly predictable. You can trust that his sandwich order is always going to be the same, that he’ll always go to the gym at the same time and on the same days, regardless of the weather, that he’ll always come home late Friday night from work and pick you up almost the moment he’s kicked his boots off and bring you to the bedroom. 

So you trust him. You do. 

But you trusted other people in your past. People who started out as too good to be true, too sweet and earnest, too eager to please you, people who lured you in with promises that turned out to be nothing more than barbed wire wrapped up in sugar. People who turned into monsters far more terrifying than anything you’ve ever seen in the blood drenched horror films you watch, more terrifying than any jump scare could ever be. People whose promises turned into threats, whose fumbling, nervous fingers turned into raised fists or open palms-

(fists and palms that never descended, but in the end, what was the difference, really?)

-people who took your money and your loyalty and and your _trust_ and turned it against you by passing it along to other people that they _flaunted_ like new jewelry strapped around a necklace or wrist, like diamonds or pearls decorating earlobes. 

It’s been two years, and he’s never shown any sign of that kind of morphing, of turning into such a beast, and all the others had started to show the signs long before they made it to the one year mark, let alone two. 

But still. 

There is a game you play when you need reassurance, when all of your past memories of misplaced trust are filling your brain like people trapped inside a stalled elevator, pounding on the metal walls with their fists, screaming and hyperventilating, distracting you from any other line of thought that isn’t directly related to them. On those days, once you’ve made it through work and gotten back home, you sit on the couch and wait, put on something mindless that you’ve already seen more times than you can count and constantly check the time on your phone until the battery level is critical and you feel like you might just shake out of your skin. 

When he finally comes through the door, always on time but always feeling three hours too late, after the heavy thud of his boots as he kicks them off echoes through your quiet apartment and he steps around the corner from the hallway into the living room, he always stops mere steps into the room, his customary _how was your day?_ greeting dying on his lips. 

“Tonight?” he asks instead, and you always nod, slide off the couch that’s been your refuge for hours. 

“Tonight,” you affirm, taking his hand like the life preserver it is and following him to the bedroom. 

This is the opening of the game that you play. It’s never identical, but always similiar, always unravels within the same narrow parameters. 

The game is called _do you trust me?_

The game goes like this. 

The lead-up to the main stage goes much like every other time you fall into bed together. You tumble onto your bed, the sheets and blanket pulled tightly across the mattress, pillows lined up neatly against the headboard, mouths connected more often than not. Most of your clothes fly through the air, flutter to the floor or end up draped over your furniture, dangling from a chair or lampshade or dresser. Sometimes, it’s you that has your back pressed into the bed, held down by his solid frame and muscle-coated limbs. Sometimes, it’s the other way around. 

Regardless of how you start out, you always end up in the latter. You always end up with him naked against the sheets, laid out underneath you with your knees pressed tight to his narrow hips, hardness separated from the crux between your legs by nothing more than your underwear, which does nothing to hide that the feeling of want is very much mutual. 

But first, the game. 

Once you’ve caught your breath, you catch his eyes, sharp and the same color as a clear sky on the coldest winter day, and nod. It’s the signal, as official as the loud blast of a starting pistol going off at a race or the jangling bell at the horse track, and with that, he stretches his arms out above his head, muscles shifting under his skin like the sand at the beach, and wraps his calloused fingers around the bars marching from one end of your headboard to the other. 

Once he nods back at you, the game continues. 

You have to move away from him just long enough to open the bottom drawer of the nightstand on your side of the bed. It’s full of detritus, littered with dried-out pens and ripped bookmarks and old tubes of lip balm, but once you’ve shoved all that stuff aside, you can get your hands on the three things you need for the game. 

Two of the three things are ties. Not the nice ones, the silken violet and magenta ones that you’d picked out together when you were shopping for a friend’s wedding. No, these ties are hideous, are covered in a paisley design in the ugliest shades of beige and tan you’ve ever seen, cost ten dollars apiece in the bargain bin at the big-box store at the edge of town, are useful for nothing more than binding his wrists to the headboard. 

The third thing, the most important thing, is the knife. 

When you lay it flat in your hand, it reaches from the base of your palm to the second knuckle of your middle finger. It’s nothing fancy; it isn’t engraved with your initials, isn’t as deadly and sleek as a butterfly blade or as vicious and serrated as the hunting knives your father keeps around the house (even though the drinking long ago put a real damper on the hunting). Technically, it’s more of a multi-tool than anything. A variety of gadgets fold out from either side of the varnished wooden handle; a corkscrew, a miniature screwdriver, even a pair of scissors. At one point, there was a logo stamped into the handle, the emblem of the sporting goods store you’d bought it at, but it’s been worn almost completely away from use, nothing left but a shadow of the words. 

But, well-used or not, the knife is still plenty sharp. 

You don’t unfold it immediately. You push the drawer closed and settle back on the bed, slightly higher than before, knees bracketing his ribs instead of his hips. Resting the knife on his sternum, you lean forward and secure first one wrist, then the other, tying them in knots that are easy enough for him to slip if necessary, knots that he taught you.

Usually, while you’re hovering over him, close enough to feel his breath on your stomach, he tilts his head up and presses his mouth to the strip of skin between your navel and the strip of your underwear. The stubble coating his jaw scrapes against you for a fleeting moment as he pulls away. While the touch is short-lived and you’ve come to expect, it never fails to make your fingers momentarily fumble and lose their place. 

Once the ties are firmly in place, the stage is set, and you can proceed. 

Picking up the knife, you slide back down, moving lower this time, so you’re hovering over his calves, his blonde leg hair tickling your knees. Getting the blade out is always the hard part; there’s a small, crescent shaped groove in the side of it that you have to hook your nail into, and you’ve broken more of them than you can count trying to do it. Once you manage to do that, the blade peels back until it clicks into place at the end of the handle, extending the total length of the knife to be longer than your hand. The blade itself is thin, would probably snap in half if you slammed it into an unyielding surface, like the counter-top in your bathroom or the tiles lining your shower, but for the purposes of _do you trust me?_ , it works just fine. 

You start at the bend of his knees, both of them crowned with thick slices of pink scar tissue from a swimming accident when he was a child, the result of small feet slipping on slick rocks and landing on other rocks with points like fangs that had bitten into his flesh just as mercilessly as the real thing. 

You always rub your thumbs over the scars first, strangely smooth under your fingertips, before you start in earnest. 

You drag the point of the blade up the inside of his leg, over the curve of his knee, first one side and then the other. You don’t put much pressure behind your movements, but the knife is sharp enough that you leave a raised line of white flesh in your wake, the beginnings of a welt. By the time you finish up, the welt will have faded to a red scratch, and in only a few days, it’ll be gone completely. 

Until the next time you play the game. 

From his knees, you only drag the knife along the inside of his leg to mid-thigh, muscles flexing and twitching underneath his taut skin; going any higher is simply too dangerous. All it would take is for you to startle, for someone to unexpectedly pound on the door or for a disorientated bird to slam into your window, for the blade to cut somewhere that would have catastrophic consequences. So, once you’ve reached that point, you drag the blade along the top of his thigh to the outside of his leg, up to his hip. The sharp vee of the bones pressing against his skin is entrancing, possibly your favorite part of his whole body-

(although if anyone had ever actually asked you about that, you’re sure that you wouldn’t be able to truly pick, torn between his glass shard eyes and strong arms or his big hands and broad shoulders)

-and you’re careful to put even less pressure here as you follow their path with the tip of the blade. Usually, this has him groaning quietly, arching his hips off the mattress so that his hardness, still prominent, not dissuaded at all by the welts and scratches you’ve left behind, brushes against the part of you that wants it the most. 

Sometimes, depending on the night, depending on how loud the screaming of your memories is, that’s enough to bring the game to an end, right then and there. 

From his hips, you move up the center of his chest, sliding forward so that your weight is settled on his stomach. You stay away from his ribs, for the same reason you venture no higher than mid-thigh; one startled reaction would be all it would take to make the blade part his skin and slide between two of the curving bones, and you’ve watched enough movies, read enough true crime books, to know how agonizing that can be. 

The point of the game isn’t to cause him any pain. No real pain, at least, nothing more than the gentle throbbing of the scratches, the wavering lines tracing along his limbs and torso. Hurting him, _really_ hurting him, would make you no better than the people in your past, the ones whose memories fill your head in screaming surround sound. 

(Sometimes though, usually on the nights when those memories are screaming so loud that you feel certain he can hear them, leaking out of your mind through your ears and nose, the whim strikes you to press just a little bit harder, drag a little bit slower, leave a deeper scratch. You never fully succumb to these whims; usually, you meet them halfway. 

Sometimes, you accidentally draw blood. Not much; only a few droplets, burbling from the break in his skin like oil from a well. 

When that happens, the game pauses until the blood has stopped flowing and your lips and tongue are red and your mouth tastes of iron and the air between you is thick with apologies.)

Once you reach his clavicle, you perform the same ritual that you bestowed upon his hipbones; you lessen the pressure until it’s nominal at best. Sometimes, when there are still healing bruises dotting the jut of the bones, bruises that you left there with your teeth the previous night, you skip over the area entirely. From there, you slide up the bed even further and plant one hand on his shoulder as you trace the knife up the long extension of his arm to the knob of his wrist, first one side and then the other. His skin is always warm under your palm, and when you’ve finished with both arms and lean in so that your foreheads are touching, so is his breath against your mouth. 

For the final step of the game, you lay the flat of the blade against the sharp line of his stubbled jaw. 

“Do you trust me?” you ask, watching his eyes as he answers. 

Not once have the words leaving his mouth contradicted the expression filling his eyes. 

“Yes,” he answers firmly. “I trust you.” 

With that, the game comes to a close. You remove the blade from his jaw and return it to its home, fold it back into the handle. You set it on the surface of whatever nightstand you can more easily reach before you lean forward and start working at the knots securing his wrists to the headboards. They always peel apart easily underneath your fingers; not once have you had to reopen the knife, slip the blade between the fabric and his wrists and shred the knot into frayed pieces. 

Once he’s free, you always pause before doing anything else, take a moment to rub at the indentations that the restraints have left in his skin. You bring your lips to them in silent thanks, like a worshiper stooping to kiss the feet of a golden statue of their deity, before you bring your lips to his, crush them together, all the careful consideration that the game requires wiped away for the time being. 

The aftermath varies, depending on the night. Sometimes, you’ll simply move back down the mattress to hover over his hips, pull your underwear to the side and slide on top of him, blessed relief finally reaching the part of your body that you’ve neglected while the game unfolded. Other times, you’ll kiss him until your chest aches, until you’re seeing black spots and pinwheels of color behind your eyelids. When you pull away to breathe, he’ll grip your thighs, flip you over, and transfer his grip to your hands, entwine your fingers together like the threads of a rope and press the back of your hands into the mattress. 

Some nights, he only lets go of your hands long enough to peel your underwear away and guide himself inside you. Then, his grip returns and stays until the both of you are dripping with sweat and gasping for breath against each other’s swollen mouths. 

You don’t talk about it, afterwards. You know that you should, that you could probably benefit from unpacking the contents of your brain, laying them out in neat lines, flowcharts of cause and effect. 

But instead, you simply lay together, arms wrapped around each other, until one of your stomachs rumble or the need for a shower simply becomes too pressing. You break apart with matching grins and laughs, slide from the bed to clean up or start dinner, and the rest of the evening unfolds much like any other ordinary one. 

By morning, even the deepest of the knife marks, the ones left by the treacherous whims of your mind, have turned into pink scratches that could easily be explained away as marks from a friend’s cat or getting caught on a nail jutting from the wall. 

Within two days at the most, they’re usually all gone. 

Until the next round.

&.

In the same way that you trust him, you’re sure that he trusts you.

It’s true that you’re more scatterbrained, more apt to forget if he asks you to do something unless you write it down, but you’ve never betrayed him with anyone else. You’ve never used him as just eye candy, an extension on your arm to impress your family-

(although they had ended up impressed anyway)

-and you’ve never taken any of his hard-earned money for your own purposes, always insisted on paying for everything equally, even back at the beginning when you’d just started working and were so overwhelmed by student loan debt that it was all you dreamed about at night. You’re sure that you can be trusted to remember his sandwich order when you go pick up dinner, you can be trusted to make sure that the recycling is sorted before you take it to the curb, you can be trusted to remember what days of the year hold painful memories for him, what words and phrases make him stop in his tracks and fall into a past that much resembles your own, in some ways. 

While you’ll never be able to know for sure, you believe that he trusts you. 

But, much as you have your game, he has his. 

You don’t know if he calls it _do you trust me?_ But the principle is the same. It’s less regimented than your own, not nearly as meticulous and ritualistic. It has two differing versions, each of them requiring a different object. 

He never comes home and announces that he’s having a night where the game is necessary, not the way you do with your retreat to the couch and your mindless sitcoms playing in the background. But there’s always a different look in his eyes, something that dulls their normally piercing nature. There’s a slump to his shoulders, and his smile doesn’t stretch nearly as large when he asks how your day was. 

You never know exactly what happens to cause those days for him, just like you’re never truly able to pin down what causes your days. But when his days do happen, you rise from the couch or step out of the kitchen, take his hand and lead him to the bedroom. 

This sequence of events remains the same between the two versions of his game, whatever it may be called in his mind, if he has a name for it at all. But once you’re in the bedroom, once your clothes have been removed, the path diverges depending on the night. 

In the first path, the first version, the only object that he requires is his hand. 

This version only occurs if his back is against the headboard, with you astride his lap, or if he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, feet planted on the floor. The glassiness of his eyes is still the same, and you know what will clear it up, but it’s his game; he has to be the one to initiate it. 

Inevitably, one of his large hands moves away from your hip and slides up your chest, between your breasts. He stops with the heel of his hand resting against your sternum, long fingers splayed along the base of your throat and your collarbone. 

“Okay?” he asks, lips parted, usually swollen from the best efforts of your mouth and teeth. You nod, and his hands moves up further, until his thumb is pressing into the pulse point immediately below your jaw and the rest of his fingers, calloused and roughened, are curved around the other side of your neck. 

“You trust me?” he asks, hips still rocking up against yours, never falling from their steady rhythm. There’s pressure on your throat, but it’s far from enough to keep you from speaking so, rather than nodding again, you answer him vocally. 

“Yes.” 

The word has barely fallen from your lips before his palm presses up and in and his fingers tighten around your neck, narrowing your throat down to a mere pinhole. You gasp for air, scratch at his shoulders, roll your hips down harder against his. Sometimes, you duck your head down to kiss him, further limiting your ability to breathe. 

He always lets go before there’s any real danger, before you grow too lightheaded. You catch your breath in great, gasping gulps of air before you nod again, and the pressure returns to your throat. 

Usually, by the third cycle, his beautiful blue eyes are back to normal, present and clear, the pupils blown. When that happens, he smiles up at you, the expression seemingly too soft for what you’re doing, and presses a series of open mouthed, lingering kisses to the aching line of your throat, each of them a sign of gratefulness. 

His hand drops from your neck to delve between your legs, to rub firm circles against your clit until you’re adding more scratches to his back and gasping his name from your raw throat.

That’s the first version. 

In the second version, he needs his belt. 

He has other belts, more of them than he really needs, you think, but there’s only one that you use for this purpose. It’s unobtrusive, doesn’t look like anything special; it’s brown with a silver buckle, made of fake leather that smells like chemicals even after all this time. It stays curled up in the bottom drawer of his nightstand like a slumbering snake. 

On the nights that he takes it out, you haven’t made it to sex yet, but you’re down to your underwear. He doesn’t ask, in so many words, but when you pull away to breathe, he reaches his hand out and rests it on the top of the nightstand, staring up at you with his clouded-over eyes. 

“Okay?” he asks. 

“Okay,” you reply, sliding off of him so that he can roll over and reach the drawer. While he brings it out, you shed the rest of your clothes. When he returns with the belt between his fingers, you slide back on top of him and lean over, sweep your hair away from your neck so that he has unrestricted access to it. The inside of the belt is rough against your skin, always leaves a scrape that you need to cover up with concealer or scarves for a few days. When the belt pulls taut and the buckle comes to rest at the base of your throat, you’re always surprised by the coolness of the metal, although it quickly warms up with contact with your skin.

With sure fingers, he feeds the prong of the buckle through the special hole he made with a hammer and nail. The rest of the belt dangles down your chest, and he wraps the excess around his fist, tugs on it gently. The buckle digs into your flesh and immediately cuts your ability to breathe in half. 

The tug is the signal that he’s truly ready, and with that, you shuffle up the bed, slowly so that you don’t accidentally jerk your neck, until you’re straddling his face, gripping the headboard for support. You give him a moment before you lower yourself down, and when his tongue first grazes against you, the belt grows even tighter around your neck as he pulls on it. 

It never takes you long to come like that, with his belt around your neck and his free hand and mouth working so skillfully between your legs, and when you look down and catch his eyes once the aftershocks have finished working their way through your thighs, his eyes have always cleared up. 

He kisses your throat in this version too, once you’ve peeled the belt away and dropped it to the floor. 

But first, you get the rest of his clothes off and ride him until his fingers bite into your hips and your thighs are shaking again. 

Afterwards is much the same as it is in your version of the game. You don’t ask him to unpack the contents of his mind. It wouldn’t be fair. Instead, he rubs soothing lotion over the scrape encircling your neck, and you lay there together, having the customary _how was your day?_ conversation that was delayed by the game. 

His marks, the bruises in the shape of his fingerprints or his palm, and the roughened skin from the inside of the belt, take longer to fade away than the marks that your blade leaves on him usually do, but you never complain. You never _want_ to complain. 

You have your game, and he has his, and at the end of the day, until the next time your mind fills with screams or the light behind his eyes goes out, you trust each other fully and completely. 

That knowledge is more than worth the marks. 

(You can only hope that he feels the same.)

**Author's Note:**

> as always, I can be found on [tumblr.](http://banshee-cheekbones.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
